You are currently browsing the Blogads for opinion makers blog archives for February, 2003.
Matt Drudge says “**THANKS A MILLION, MAKE THAT A HUNDRED MILLION, FOR MAKING FEB 2003 — THE HEAVIEST TRAFFIC MONTH IN THE 8-YEAR HISTORY OF DRUDGE REPORT/// MAIN DRUDGE PAGE HAS BEEN VIEWED 113,257,740 SO FAR IN FEBRUARY, PASSING JANUARY 2003, THE PREVIOUS HIGH**”
As Hemingway said: “Find one thing you like and do it well and every day. You will be happy and the world will be happy.” (Until later… of course.)
Pulling off a virtuouso performance in mixing genres, Matt Welch strings together some fun tales about busking in Central Europe and then astonishes with a glissando into some snappy commercial lessons (eight of them!) that apply to blogging. Desperation-buskers bum people out… harmonies, harmonies, harmonies… prime the pump…. Go read them all.
Well Google has gone and made it official, extending its Adwords program to the pages of HowStuffWorks, Blogger, and Weather Underground. The new program is called Content Targeted Advertising.
if users look up the weather forecast for Palm Springs on a weather site, they may see ads for deals on hotels and cars in the Palm Springs area. Or, if users are reading about how an acoustic guitar works on a music site, they may see ads for hand-crafted acoustic guitars.
The service offers a great new tool for advertisers. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we’ll continue to strive to mold Blogads into a tool that offers additional advantages to bloggers and advertisers:
a) Bloggers get the bulk of the proceeds from their Blogads sales.
b) Bloggers get to approve every ad before it appears.
c) Advertisers get more options (images, longer text, comments.)
d) Advertisers can use superlatives like “lowest” and “best” which are not allowed in Google Adwords.
e) Google kills ads that don’t get a 1% clickthru, so its tool is only effective for direct marketers, not brand-builders.
We’ll scramble to keep Blogads differentiated. Google may be a brilliant and wonderfully benign company… but if it does get a monopoly on blog advertising, innovation will slow.
It is also worth noting that this “content targetted advertising” initiative moves Google even more firmly into competition with ad sellers inside traditional media (and or traditional media itself), since it will be competing head-to-head with the ad sales arms of the likes of NYTimes.com, WSJ.com and CNN.com right down to smaller outlets like Cleveland.com and Gazette.net/ All rely on well-paid teams of ad salespeople and expensive user profiling… will these be jettisoned for Google?
Anne Holland writes: “Last Friday night I was chatting with Seana Mulcahy VP, Director of Interactive Media Mullen whose team buys hundreds of millions of dollars in online ads each year. ‘Publishers make it impossible to buy from them!” she ranted. She’s one of many media buyers who are increasingly frustrated with the lack of standards so art departments have to resize and redo ads constantly for each different site (the cost of which really adds up) and how hard it is to make an integrated ad buy across all of a single media company’s channels without negotiating and cutting multiple insertion orders. Online advertising is to some degree also a service business. Being easier to buy from than your competitor may be a highly significant advantage. It’s not content + eyeballs = profits. It’s content + friendly service = profits.’” (Thanks Olivier!)
Tough times for some in publishing.
BIOS, one of the building blocks of the PC, was hacked together more than 20 years ago as a temporary solution; engineers thought it would only last for the first 250,000 machines before being replaced by something better.
“New research shows that some traumatized people may be better off repressing the experience than illuminating it in therapy. If you’re stuck and scared, perhaps you should not remember but forget.” (Link.)
A bunch of people have written to ask whether we’re worried about Google’s purchase of Pyra/Blogger, noting that Google could start to sell ads on the blogs that Pyra hosts.
Well, just days after Google bought Pyra, Matt Haughey has discovered that Google is already running its textads on Blogspot sites. For example, check out KEH Camera Brokers ad atop this photography-oriented blog and compare it with the ads running in the right column of this Google search for “Leica.” See the redundancy?
These were not ads bought specifically to run on blogs, since no such choice exists in Google’s Adwords forms; the advertiser likely opted to allow the ads to be “syndicated” onto Google’s partner sites. (According to Googles Adwords terms, these partners include America Online, Inc. CompuServe, Netscape, AT&T Worldnet, EarthLink, Inc. and Sympatico Inc.)
Does this threaten our Blogads service? No. (That’s not the same answer I’d give to the question “are you nervous as hell?”)
For the forseeable future, we offer bloggers and advertisers certain unique advantages:
a) Bloggers get the bulk of the proceeds from their Blogads sales.
b) Bloggers get to approve every ad before it appears.
c) Advertisers get more options (images, longer text, comments.)
d) Advertisers can use words like “lowest” which are not allowed in Google Adwords.
e) Google kills ads that don’t get a 1% clickthru, so its ads are only effective for direct marketers rather than brand-builders.
We’ll scramble to keep Blogads differentiated. Google may be a brilliant and wonderfully benign company… but if it does get a monopoly on blog advertising, nobody’s gonna be too happy.
A reader asks: “You have a book in the works on some of this stuff? 
Just the sense I get’”
No book. I’m generally unable to think in patches of more than 1000 words. I wrote a senior essay in college that resurrected Darwin’s Christian credentials by re-uniting his language with its then-current theological context… and the damn thing mutated into an attempt to overturn the reigning theory of intellectual history… and nearly killed me. I was right, but history will never know it. I’m a sprinter and can’t stick to an outline for more than a week. That said, I’m amazed to find that blogging is helping me churn out patches of text that might be woven together into something larger… micro-competitors versus behemoths, the network as the new publisher, disintermediation, intraction… oh no, better stop.
I’ll stick to service-building and blog-storming. The force of competition, investors, colleagues and clients keep me tethered to a trajectory… even if it isn’t yet clear exactly where that is.
Writing in the National Post, Matt Welch makes impassioned arguments for populist print media against the entrenched dailies staffed by acres of complacent professional journalists. He champions the low-overhead free dailies run by Metro that target strap hangers.
Matt doesn’t mention blogs, but the same logic applies… squared. Many blogs — BoingBoing, Gawker, Slashdot and Tom’s Hardware — have the same populist content, lower costs of production and faster-compounding circulations. Look for more local blogs (Localogs?) as 2003 matures.
Remember, when ecosystems undergo radical change, the smallest organisms survive and adapt fastest and grow to dominate expansive new niches.
“Just like everybody should have at least one friend who owns a truck, everybody should know at least one Matt Welch…” Howard Owens writes.
Went to see Amherst play Bowdoin Saturday in the first round of the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Bowdoin started a 6′6” freshman from Iowa City, Iowa who looks like a stretched Rick Bruner. The kid played with a nonchalant excellence that could be easily mistaken for arrogance, blocking shots, tossing headfakes, scrambling by fleeter-looking players. But he missed a bunch of easy shots in the first few minutes that probably cost Bowdoin the game. The game was much closer than the final score, 78-67, looks.
“Two years ago… weather.com, the Web site of cable television’s Weather Channel, ran on 80 Sun servers. Today, the data center for weather.com is filled with 123 Intel-based servers running Linux ‘ and Sun was sent packing. The savings on hardware were $2.3 million, according to Dan Agronow, vice president for technology at weather.com, who added that maintenance costs were lower, too.” Link.
Blogcritics offer their albums of the year.
Everyone is puzzled by Google’s purchase of Blogger.
Google likely was not after either blogging brainpower and technology, since it didn’t employ investment-banking SOP and talk to other blogtech players before making the purchase.
Yet Google couldn’t have been after Blogger’s content. As Dave Winer puts it, “Pyra claims to have over 1 million Blogger users, with 200,000 active users. But Google didn’t buy their content, because Pyra doesn’t own it, the users do. They didn’t buy access to the content because they already had it.”
In fact, Google does not “have it.” Google doesn’t really index Blogger-produced- or-hosted content, at least, very effectively. Want proof? Search Google for Blogger + Google… and you get a bunch of Movable Type sites. Of the leading Blogging tech providers, Blogger was the only one that doesn’t handle Google particularly well.
So maybe the explanation for this buyout is mundanely technical: perhaps Google does want to improve Noogle by including more blogs. But Google knows that Pyra, the biggest blog host, doesn’t have the resources (or desire?) to hack the minute-by-minutes swarms of freshbots that feed Noogle. Maybe Google wished Blogger put headlines into the title tag so posts would get their fair PR and be Google-user friendly. (Look at Evhead’s titleless posts in Google and you’ll realize just how annoying Blogger entries are when seen through Google’s eyes.)
Was trading a few Google shares for Blogger the fastest way to improve Noogle? (Or to block Microsoft from acquiring Pyra and quietly reducing Blogger’s Google-friendliness?)
“Bindy” Lambton’s roller-coaster obituary. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)
Ernie the attorney gets an e-mail about the three stages of blog awareness. (Via Dave Winer.)
These comments on the Google/blogger post at the fine Blogroots throw up the idea that Google bought Blogger to add to its menu of corporate offerings. After all, selling knowledge management tools to companies for $100,000 a piece is a lot more fun (for most) than selling sites for $29.95. Someone also points out that the Google hasn’t yet put out a press-release. While this is a big deal for Bloggers and blogging, is it a big deal for Google? Finally, here’s a link to the essay that first imagined Google.
Tireless Hylton Jolliffe is the superlative blog digester. I just wish he’d tell us what he thinks about it all.
UC Irvine scientists “exposed volunteers to a fake print advertisement describing a visit to Disneyland where they would meet Bugs Bunny. Later, 33 percent of these volunteers claimed they knew or remembered the event happening to them. (Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. character and has never appeared at Disneyland.)” Link
Want to vent? Go Shakespearean. (Thanks Dora!)
What is Google doing with Blogger? Dow Jones says “Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch online newsletter, said one possibility is for Google to post small ads related to the themes of specific Weblogs that use the Blogger software. For example, Google might display travel-related links from advertisers that wanted to reach Web surfers visiting a travel blog that relies on the Blogger software. ‘I think Google sees this deal as a great way to grab some content and get their ads out on it,’ Sullivan said.”
Great. Come on Google, let’s rumble.
[Five] Eight years ago today, Dave Winer wrote: “Every new website begets more websites. If I have one, I want my friend to have one, so I can point to it. And so they can point to my site. Someday I’ll be able to walk a network of friendships, automatically knowing that each of us has mutual friends. It’ll be cool.” His prophecy was called “Billions of websites.” Read the whole thing — it will make your spine tingle.
Glenn Reynolds gave a nice plug for Blogads yesterday. “Now that Google has seen the value of tapping into the blogosphere, I think that a lot of other folks will want to, too.” Blogads “lets advertisers reach select audiences with highly desirable demographics for next to nothing,” writes Glenn.
A friend writes:
A couple of thoughts occurred to me on the Google/Pyra deal. I think it’s good all around, having been to the Googleplex a couple of times and worked with them on XXX. They’re great people, and yes, the food really is that
good.Firstly, I understand they’re in the runup to their IPO. They have a good cash position and are looking to generate interest. Wouldn’t that mean more purchases of smaller companies at fire-sale prices are on the way? The really interesting question is, who’s around that would make sense for them really?
A while ago I saw something in E&P a couple of weeks ago about their ability - if they wanted to - to turn Google News into a huge aggregator and paid content mediator.
In this way, a Pyra tie-up would give them a leg up on spotting the new “hubs” as you call ‘em.
Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if Winer’s talking to one of the SOAP players. Maybe Microsoft themselves?
Just as Blogger was bought by Google, it sounds like proto-blogging software company Userland has a deal cooking with another major player. Or at least that is what Userland owner Dave Winer seems to be hinting when he writes: “I wouldn’t be surprised if the other popular blogging tools had similar deals cooking. Not much more to say at this time. Except…”
Also, it is worth noting that Jeff Jarvis is one of the wise people who helped keep Blogger afloat.
Ken Layne mentions that Google, the Internet’s most successful company, has bought Pyra, the company that owns Blogger.
Wow.
A Google spokesman says blogging is “a global self-publishing phenomenon that connects Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation.”
Looks like Dave Winer is going to win his $1000 bet with NYTimes.com’s Martin Nisenholtz sooner rather than later. Last April Dave bet that “in a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.”
Google serves far more than the 150 million searches a day it admits publicly. And Google already serves far more people seeking New York information than does the New York Times.
Processing more than half all Internet searches, Google already has cornered the demand for information; with Blogger, it has a chance to dominate the supply as well.
Blogging… no… Internet publishing now moves beyond the beta-test.
Update: Cory Doctorow gives a good overview of Blogger history and suggests one future. And the New York Times reports on the deal and recycles the specious “150 million searches a day” number. AGGGG.
On a milder note, I noticed that Ken has been going to see UNR Wolf Pack college basketball games. We’ve also been enjoying college hoops this winter, watching the Amherst Jeff’s (20-3!) win three games. In contrast to Reno, the bleachers hold only 400 and there’s no beer… but seats are free. I haven’t watched division III college basketball in 20 years and amazed at how swift and muscular the action is. The shot clock and weight-lifting seem have transformed the game.
Slashdot is having a good free-for-all about power laws and communities. Do all communities (or networks) inevitably over-reward some participants and under-reward others? And, if this is true, do enough benefits accrue from the sorting to overshadow the unfair distribution of rewards? As one Slashdotter puts it: “Friend/foe systems, such as the one here at Slashdot, tend to actually make community better rather than worse.” I’ve chewed on this questionhere before.
